Tag Archives: ecology

Unless you have lived in a news vacuum for the last two weeks or so, you will be aware of the impending “Ecological Armageddon” that is about to be unleashed upon us. A paper in the journal PLoS ONE in which it was reported that there had been a 75% decline in the biomass of flying insects in protected areas in Germany since 1989 was the starting pistol that began the media frenzy. The newspapers, both broadsheet and tabloids were quick to react as were the radio and TV stations and the coverage was global as this selection of links shows.

Entomologists were in great demand for a few days, all being asked to comment gravely on the paper and its implications. I was also persuaded to air my thoughts on air, Talk Radio having caught me at an unguarded moment. I should never have answered the ‘phone 😊

As the media frenzy subsided, the more considered responses began to appear. Manu Saunders very sensibly attempted to put the study in perspective and point out its limitations. Two entomologists from the Game & Wildlife Conservancy Trust which hold an even longer data set, put forward their interpretation and an ecological consultancy also took the opportunity to comment. The authors of the paper and the blog commentators were careful not to point the finger directly at pesticides as the main cause of this decline, although they did rule out climate change. Agricultural intensification and the practices associated with it, were however, suggested as likely to be involved in some way, something that has been known for more than a century as the naturalist and novelist Gene Stratton-Porter pointed out in 1909 in her novel A Girl of the Limberlost,

“Men all around were clearing available land. The trees fell wherever corn would grow. The swamp was broken by several gravel roads…Wherever the trees fell the moisture dried, the creeks ceased to flow, the river ran low, and at times the bed was dry. From coming in with two or three dozen rare moths a day, in three years time Elnora had grown to be delighted with finding two or three. Big pursy caterpillars could not be picked from their favourite bushes, where there were no bushes. Dragonflies could not hover over dry places and butterflies became scare in proportion to the flowers”.

What puzzles me about the media response is why now and why this particular study? We have known for a long time that some insect groups have been in decline for many years. The parlous state of UK butterflies and moths has been highlighted on more than one occasion over the last couple of decades (e.g. Conrad et al., 2004; Thomas et al., 2004; Fox et al., 2013), and declines in the abundance of bibionid flies (D’Arcy-Burt & Blackshaw, 1987), dragonflies (Clausnitzer et al., 2009) and carabid beetles (Brooks et al., 2012) have also been noticed and written about. In addition, the results of a 42-year study on insects associated with cereal fields in SE England was published recently (Ewald et al., 2015), with little or no fanfare associated with it. I commented on the decline of some insect species (and entomologists) in a blog post in 2013 and in December of last year, wrote about the general decline of insect numbers and lack of long term studies, incidentally citing the German study when it was originally published in a little known German publication back in 2013 and with far fewer authors 😊

The media response to this not new news puts me in mind of the Ash Die Back scare of 2012 when the press and politicians having

Pests and diseases recorded as entering the UK 1960-2015. The two arrows indicate the replacement of local forest offices with central district offices and reduction in entomology and pathology staff.

been warned and made aware of the increasing incidence of non-native pests and pathogens entering the country for many years beforehand, suddenly, and in response to an intractable problem, went overboard in reporting doom and destruction

My hypothesis, for what it is worth, is that it is like when a tap washer starts to wear out, and your tap starts to drip. At first you just ignore it or turn the tap ever more tightly every time you use it. Eventually something gives, either the tap breaks off (this happened to me very recently) or the drip becomes a flood. Either way, something needs to be done, i.e. call the plumber. In the case of the Ash Die Back episode, the UK government responded positively, albeit too late to prevent it, but by setting up the Tree Health and Plant Biosecurity Expert Taskforce of which I was privileged to be a member, recommendations were made that resulted in increased forest research funding and additional legislation being put in force to hopefully reduce the chances of further invasions. I suspect that the current “Ecological Armageddon” scenario will not result in a similar response, although it may encourage research councils worldwide to think more seriously about funding more research into sustainable agriculture and for governments to encourage farmers to adopt farming strategies that encourage more wildlife and use fewer inputs. At the same time, given the increasing number of studies that implicate urbanisation as a major factor in the decline of insect numbers (e.g. Jones & Leather, 2012; Dennis et al., 2017) it would behove local planning authorities to increase their efforts to provide much-needed green spaces in our towns and cities and to ban the use of decking in gardens and the replacement of front gardens with concrete and tarmac car parking areas.

What it does highlight as Manu Saunders said in her blog, is that we need funding for more long-term studies. We also need to find instances where the data already exist but have not yet been analysed, amateur records and citizen science projects may be of use here. Alternatively, as was very recently done in France (Alignier, 2018), it is possible, using the identical protocol, to resample a site after a gap of decades, to see what changes have occurred.

I hope for the sake of our descendants that the reports of an “Ecological Armageddon” have been exaggerated. This should however, be a wake-up call to all those with the power to do something to mitigate the decline in biodiversity worldwide. Governments need to respond quickly and to think long-term and responsibly. The current attitude of politicians to adopt a short-term ‘how safe is my job’ political viewpoint is no longer a viable one for the planet. It is precisely that attitude that got us into the situation that we find ourselves in now.

If you are reading this article this afternoon (13th September 2017) it is quite possible that I am at this very moment giving my talk about the challenges and rewards of blogging to a live audience at ENTO’17 in Newcastle 🙂 In my talk, I began by explaining how it was that I became a fan of social media, first Twitter and then as a blogger. I have already written about my conversion in an earlier post and how much I feel that social media adds to academic life, so I will not bore you with the whole story again.

Suffice it to say pre-Twitter and pre-blogging I was writing a lot, but mainly to the wrong audience.

The second part of my talk attempted to answer the following questions. As an academic why should you blog? What are the benefits? What are the risks? What are the challenges? Is it part of your day job? More importantly, how can you convince your university or research institute that you should spend office time blogging? What follows is the ‘script’ of my talk.

I started blogging because I felt that the way I was trying to get the importance and wonder of entomology across to non-entomologists was too limited. I was not interacting with enough people outside the field, I needed to widen the scope of my activities. Yes I was going into schools and talking to natural history societies, gardening clubs and on occasions youth groups and organisations like the Women’s Institute or the U3A, but I was only talking to tens of people. I wanted (needed) to talk to hundreds, even thousands of people to feel that I had a chance of getting my message across that the future of the natural world lay in an understanding of the invertebrate world and not of the “large charismatic mega-fauna”. Hence my leap into the world of Twitter, and certainly with a following of over 5000, I am now potentially talking to thousands of people, according to my analytics my Tweets earn nearly 5 000 impressions a day. The trouble with Tweets is that by their very nature they are transient and flow down the Twitter timeline to obscurity at a tremendous rate. They are also not easily reference-able. A blog on the other hand, if hosted on a reputable site, is as permanent as anything is these days, and as each post has a unique address, also has the advantage of being able to be linked to and found by search engines. It was thus a logical step to launch a blog which is what I did, and Don’t Forget the Roundabouts was born.

A blog is born

I did not take this step lightly. As the point of starting a blog was to make an impact, it could not be anonymous. The content of the blog needed the backing of my professional reputation to hopefully give it the stamp of reliability and authority. I was, and still am, putting my reputation on the line every time I post a blog article. It was thus with some sense of trepidation that I went public. Writing a blog is a whole different thing to submitting a paper to a journal where you are subjected to peer review and your readership is pretty much limited to people who are very similar to yourself and whom have access to scientific journals. Anyone with access to the internet can find, read and comment on a blog. A scary thought. I felt it was worth it and still do. There were two other reasons besides my wish to increase the range of my outreach and to increase the level of interactions, that made the idea of starting a blog seem logical.

Reasons to start a blog

As a teenager I loved English, both language and literature (I still do, I have a personal library of over 10 000 books) and even had aspirations of becoming a novelist. As those of us who have been around for a longish time will know, as you become more successful at getting grants and increasing the size of your research group, you get further and further away from the bench and/or field and do more and more ‘editing’ and commenting on other people’s writing. In my case this had resulted in me finding it more and more daunting when faced with a blank sheet of paper or an empty word processing document. I saw the prospect of producing blog articles as a way of getting back into the habit of starting from scratch and also of learning a more relaxed and accessible style ready for my retirement plans of writing “popular”* entomology books. Finally, I thought it might be fun, my late father often voiced the opinion (especially when I was a teenager) that I “loved the sound of my own voice”. Writing a blog does indeed give me the opportunity to sound off now and then and I make all sorts of fantastic discoveries when I am doing the background research for an article. I freely confess, I enjoy writing my blog immensely. It really is great fun.

Is it all positive? Of course there are challenges, it would be foolish to deny it. Finding the time to manage a blog can be a problem. I am not retired, I have a full-time academic position, running a research group, editing journals, reviewing papers and grant proposals, writing and co-writing scientific papers, sitting on committees, and of course teaching students, both undergraduates and postgraduates. Writing a blog is yet another call on my time, but one I am happy to heed. I do blog writing and research at work

Enough to put you off?

and at home. My contract does actually have a paragraph that mentions outreach so I feel justified in doing this. Another challenge that might seem daunting is that of coming up with topics to write about. Before I went public, I wrote five articles and filled an A4 piece of paper with potential topics that I thought would be fun to write about and of interest to others. In reality I found that just living life provides topics enough to allow me to produce an article every couple of weeks. There is always something that sparks an idea for a potential blog article, be it a scientific paper I read, something in the news or even as has happened twice now, a piece of fiction.

A challenge to some bloggers is that of motivation. Unless you happen to be paid to be a blogger or make a living from it, then it can be hard to make the time and take the effort to write something regularly. Luckily for me, I am somewhat competitive, even when the only other entrant in the race is myself. I set a target of two articles a month but regularly find myself doing three, just to make sure that I am ahead of schedule and also I get quite a buzz on ‘publication’ day when the daily view total shows a spike in response to your activity 🙂

The publication day spike

I have to admit that the fact that WordPress generates a number of statistics that you can track and compare, gives me plenty of motivation 🙂

The other challenge which I alluded to is the slightly anxious feeling that you get every time you publish an article. Firstly as I mentioned earlier, because I am blogging as me, I really, really want what I say to be correct. I find that I do as much, if not more background reading for a blog article as I do for a scientific paper. I definitely do a lot more historical reading for the blog articles because it is very interesting and I also find it fun to delve back to the origins of a topic. If I had not written an article about aphid symbionts I would never have discovered that Thomas Henry Huxley had worked on aphids which made me even impressed with him than before. The other times that I feel anxious are when I publish something that Is not strictly within my field but moe of an opinion piece. When I got upset about he British Ecological Society (BES) and their conference catering policy I wrote rather an angry, although, at least in my opinion, a well-argued article. I was somewhat hesitant in pressing the publish button, but went ahead and did so, and then sat back waiting for the angry responses from vegetarians and vegans. To my surprise the expected lambasting did not materialise and I received several complimentary comments and emails.

The BES were even kind enough to publish a slightly edited version in their Bulletin. In some ways I have been slightly disappointed that this, and other articles dealing with ‘controversial’ viewpoints have not generated more critical responses, although I guess I should count my blessings and not angle for brickbats.

Enough about the challenges, what about the benefits? Have I made an impact? As far as I am concerned the answer is a resounding YES. I am read all around the world and I am pretty certain that my 175 blog posts have been read more than my 230 scientific papers.

A worldwide reach – I have been read by someone in almost every country in the world

I am particularly proud of having one of my blog posts referenced in a book about preparing for PhD vivas (Smith, 2013).

I have also been invited by magazines and societies to convert some of my blog posts into articles for publications aimed at reaching more general audiences in an accessible and informative way.

Making an impact and bringing entomology to a wider audience

More conventionally, some of my blog posts have gone mainstream and appeared in scientific journals, a bit of reverse outreach 😊

Some of my blog posts that have made it into the scientific literature

Something that may put people off blogging is the possibility that their employer may not see a benefit in their activity and only not encourage but perhaps even discourage, their staff from becoming bloggers. It was to counter this perception that a group of like-minded bloggers and I got together to present an analysis of the value and impact of blogging in ecology. It was an interesting and rewarding exercise** and last week we were rewarded by having our paper accepted for publication in a prestigious journal.

Squaring the circle – a mainstream paper about the benefits of blogging for scientists

Proof that this was a fun project to collaborate on and write about

I think that there is a very strong case for more scientists to become bloggers, but if you do decide to take up the challenge and become a blogger you should first ask yourself exactly what it is you hope to get from it. Is it just for pleasure, is it for outreach, to practice writing or to draw attention to yourself to increase interactions with others in your disciplines?

Three simple rules to ease you into the blogosphere

Whatever your reasons there are things that you can do to make your blog a success and help you overcome the challenges I have outlined above. First, be well prepared have some articles in reserve, especially when you launch your blog. It is also a good idea to post at regular intervals, not necessarily often. Having a ‘deadline’ will help you with your writing and time management and people will start to expect to hear from and may even become subscribers to your blog. It is also important not to get downhearted or impatient. It takes time to build an audience. Blogs grow at different rates depending on a number of factors including blogging frequency and audience interaction (Saunders et al., 2017).

A frequent poster

My blog, regular but not as frequent as Jeff Ollerton’s Biodiversity Blog

Finally, it is important to do as much as possible to publicise your blog, use the tag function to help search engines direct people to your blog and I would urge you to join Twitter and do remember to use all the publicise buttons that your blog host provides.

I look forward to seeing a plethora of new entomology and ecology blogs. Happy Blogging.

I am certain that everyone who has studied biology at university and/or been on a field course, will have used a sweep net and heard the phrase “It’s all in the wrist”. Along with the pitfall trap it is the most commonly used entomological sampling technique used today. Although the premise is simple enough, a sturdy net, attached to a handle that is swept along, through or above low-lying vegetation, when used as a scientific tool and not just as a collecting device, things become somewhat more complex. The sweep net, as an insect collecting device, has been around for at least 180 years, the earliest reference that I have been able to find being Newman* (1835). There are a number of slightly later references in both general entomology texts and group specific books (e.g. Newman, 1844; Clark, 1860; Douglas, 1860; Douglas & Scott, 1865). Instructions for their use at this time are minimal, as this extract from Newman (1841) illustrates.

Newman (1841) a very brief description indeed.

This slightly later description of how to make a sweep net is, however, much more detailed, albeit somewhat sexist.

From Stainton (1852), although he seems to be quoting Newman. Apparently Victorian men were unable to sew.

More detailed, albeit fairly basic instructions on how to use a sweep net can be found in those two invaluable sources, Ecological Methods (Southwood & Henderson 2004) (two pages) and Practical Field Ecology (Wheatear et al., 2011) (one page). I was amused to see that the text in Southwood & Henderson was identical to that of the first edition (Southwood, 1966).

Now we come to the wrist action. There are a surprising number of ways in which you can swing a sweep net, but they all depend on the wrist moving your hand, and hence the net, in a figure of eight. The two most commonly used are what I think of as the one row side step, and the double front step. In the former you walk in a straight line swinging the net backwards and forwards at your side, ideal for sampling a row crop. The latter, the double front step, is similar, but instead of swinging the net at your side, you swing it side to side in front of you as you walk along. In a crop, this is great for sampling multiple rows, in a non-crop a good way of covering a nice wide area of vegetation. There are a further two techniques specifically designed for sweeping the upper part of vegetation, both originally devised for sampling soybean insects, the lazy-8 and the pendulum (Kogan & Pitre, 1980). Both these involve having the net raised, the lazy-8 with the net raised above the crop at the back and front swings, whereas in the pendulum, the net is kept within the crop on the fore and reverse swings. The final bit of wrist action, and arguably the most important and difficult to learn, is the flick-lock, which neatly seals the net and stops your catch escaping.

Having completed your sample of however many sweeps (remember a complete sweep is the figure of eight), and sealed your net, the next step is to transfer your catch to your collecting tubes, bags or jars. A good sweep net, as well as being made from tough material, should be a bit sock shaped. By this I mean that there is a ‘tail’ at the base of the net which helps make your catch more manageable if you are transferring directly to a plastic bag, as you are able to grab the net above the ‘tail’ end and push it into the collecting bag, before everting the net.

When I was a student, the sweep nets we were supplied with, were large enough to stick not just your head inside, but also to get your arms in, so that you could Poot up anything interesting, your shoulders forming the seal to the net. Admittedly you did sometimes have an angry bee or wasp to contend with, but that was a rare event 🙂 Nowadays, sweep nets seem to be constructed on a much more modest scale, which makes sticking your head, let alone your shoulders into one, somewhat difficult.

Even the biggest modern one is too small for me to get my arms in to do some Pooting.

I was pleasantly surprised on an ERASMUS exchange visit to the University of Angers a few years ago, to find that the French, or at least those in Angers, were using sweep nets that were big enough for me to actually delve inside just as I did when I was a student 🙂

The joys of a sweep net with a view 🙂

Despite their undoubted popularity, value for money and relative ease of operation, there are a number of problems associated with sweep netting as a sampling technique. Although these problems are summarised elsewhere (Southwood & Henderson 2004; Wheater et al., 2011) I can’t resist putting my own personal slant on the subject.

The type of habitat can have a marked effect on what you catch. Not all habitats are equally amenable to sweeping; spiny and woody vegetation poses more problems than a nice meadow and you need a really tough net for moorlands 🙂

A sweep net doesn’t necessarily give you an accurate picture of the species composition of the habitat. Not all insects are equally catchable, you are for example, much more likely to catch Hemipterans than you are Coleopterans (e.g. Standen, 2000)

The vertical distribution of the insects also affects what you catch. Many insects have favourite positions on plants e.g. the cereal aphid, Sitobion avenae prefers the ears and leaves, whereas the bird cherry-oat aphid, Rhopalosiphum padi is usually found at the bottom of the plant (Dean, 1974).

The weather; anyone who has tried sweep netting during, or after, a rain storm knows that this is the ultimate act of folly 🙂 Wet nets and wet samples are not a marriage made in heaven.

Time of day can also affect what you are likely to catch, pea aphids for example, are found at different heights on their host plants at different times of day (Schotzko & O’Keeffe, 1989). To be fair, this is of course not just a problem confined to sweep net sampling.

Sweep nets have a fairly well-defined height range at which they work best, they are not good at sampling very short grass and once the vegetation gets over 30 cm you start to miss a lot of the insects associated with it as the net doesn’t reach that far down. Also the efficiency of the sweep netter is reduced.

Finally, how the hell do you standardise your sweeps, not only between sweepers, but as an individual? Additionally, can you reliably use them quantitatively? This has been recognised as a problem for a long time (DeLong, 1932). No one disagrees that sweep netting, provided all the caveats listed above are taken into account, gives a very good qualitative and comparative idea of the arthropod community of the area you are sweeping and they have been so used in many important ecological studies (e.g. Menhinick, 1964; Elton, 1975; Janzen & Pond, 1975) and extensively in agricultural systems (e.g. Free & Williams, 1979; Kogan & Pitre, 1980). Comparing any sampling technique with another is difficult, and any attempt to quantify a catch so that specific units can be assigned to the area or volume sampled is welcome. This has been attempted for the sweep net (Tonkyn, 1980), although I confess that I have never seen anyone use the formula developed by him. In fact, although, according to Google Scholar his paper has been cited thirteen times, only one of the citing authors actually uses the formula, the rest just use him to cite sweep netting as a sampling method. Poor practice indeed.

An illustration of how the various components of the sweep net volume formula is derived (from Tonkyn, 1980).

Sweep nets are, despite the inability to get inside them anymore, great fun to use, extremely good at collecting material for ecology and entomology practicals and of course, a great ecological survey tool when used properly. Google Scholar tells me that there are over 38 000 papers that mention them. That many people can’t possibly be wrong 🙂

References

Clark, H. (1860) Catalogue of the Collection of Halticidae in the British Museum. Physapodes and Oedipodes Part 1. Published by the Trustees, London.

For those of you interested in the press coverage of the UK General Election, an analysis of the newspaper coverage. I guarantee that you will be surprised as to which were the two most impartial papers.

Once upon a time we had the milk lake and the butter mountain, but now a butter shortage means bad news for croissant lovers in France

Without them, we would find the world a very different place, that is if we were still alive. Yet very few people give them a thought, and then usually only to dismiss them or castigate them for impinging on our comfortable lives. Animals without backbones, the micro-flora and fauna, are what keep the world a place in which we can make a living. Politicians however, and many others of our fellow travellers on this fragile planet, seem unaware of their importance. Donald Trump rescinds environmental protection laws as if they are a hindrance to humankind rather than a boon, BREXIT politicians and their supporters in the UK extol the virtues of escaping from those silly EU environmental laws that prevent them from polluting our beaches and rivers and making our air unbreathable. We all need to take a step back and adjust our vision so that we can appreciate the little things that run the world and understand that despite our size, our abundance and our apparent dominance, that we too are a part of nature.

I and many others have written about this topic on many occasions but it is a message that bears repetition again and again. I leave you with the passage that stimulated my latest rant and a few links to similar pieces.

“In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world’s existing animal species are snail-sized or smaller. It’s almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size and the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth; snails and worms create soil, and blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable; the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time.”

Elizabeth Tova Bailey (2010) – The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Here are a few links to give you food for thought and to inspire you to find more of the same.

Sadly this is the tenth and last in my series of the ten papers that had a great influence on my life as an ecologist. I’m going to cheat somewhat and actually discuss three papers. In my defence they are extremely closely linked and I am pretty certain that in today’s publishing world they would all have had to have been combined anyway. That aside, I really liked this experiment the first time I read about it and still rate it very highly. I would, however, love to be able to travel back in time and give them a couple of hints with the benefit of hind-sight, although as the authors are two of the greatest living ecologists, Dan Simberloff and E O Wilson, I might be a bit apprehensive doing so 🙂 In any case, much of what I would have said was addressed a few years later (Simberloff, 1976).

Wilson and Simberloff wanted to practically test the island biogeography theory famously described by McArthur and Wilson a few year earlier (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967). To do this they travelled to the Florida Keys and after due reconnaissance decided that the many mangrove “tree islands” would be ideal study sites (Figure 1). Then came the really cool bit.

Figure 1. Two of the experimental ‘islands’ from Wilson & Simberloff (1969)

They set about removing the arthropod animal life from nine of the islands (Figure 2), or as much as they could, by fogging with methyl bromide; not something we could do now. They then monitored the islands at frequent intervals for the next year. They had of course surveyed the islands before they fumigated them.

The major finding from their study was that recolonization happened quite quickly and that a year later had pretty much reached an equilibrium position (Figure 3). Another important finding and one that has important implications for restoration and conservation strategies was that two years after the defaunation event, although the islands were well populated, the species composition, except for one island was less than 40% similar to the original inhabitants (Simberloff & Wilson (1970). Most species present were new to those islands. The analysis of the data presented in the two data papers is rather basic, some of the key island biogeographical premises are not addressed at all and I wondered why they had not done so. Their data are all shown in some detail so it is possible to do some more analysis, which I took the liberty of doing. The extra analysis shows why they did not discuss area effects per se . The only significant relationship that I could find was that between the number of species and the distance from the ‘mainland’ source (Figure 4), which as predicted by MacArthur & Wilson (1967) was negative. Sadly, island size did not correlate with species number (Figure5). Finally, there was a positive, but not significant relationship between the initial number of species found on an island and the number a year later (Figure 6).

Figure 4. Relationship between distance from ‘mainland’ source and the number of arthropod species present (R2 = 0.65, P <.0.05) Data from Simberloff & Wilson (1970).

Figure 5. Island diameter and number of arthropod species (not statistically significant, r2 = 0.19, although I am sure many politicians would view this as a positive trend). Data from Simberloff & Wilson (1970)

Figure 6. Initial number of species on an island and number of species present one year later. Although it looks convincing (r2 = 0.54), there are too few observations to reach statistical significance. Data from Simberloff & Wilson (1970)

Although this work was extremely influential, (my Bracknell roundabouts study owes a lot to it), there were two major flaws in the original experimental design. Firstly the number of islands was very low, but of course this is understandable, given the effort and complex logistics required to remove the arthropods safely (Figure 2). The other flaw was that the islands did not cover a large enough range of sizes, thus making it less likely for the species-area pattern to be detected which was a great shame.

As I mentioned earlier, these short-comings were not ignored by the authors, and a few years later Sinberloff (1976) reported the results of an enhanced study, again in the Florida Keys, where he was able to convincingly demonstrate the species-area effect. I guess that this was pretty satisfying as it tied up a number of loose strings. He also managed to get the phrase “flogging a dead horse” into his introduction 🙂

Of the three papers, Simberloff & Wilson (1969) is the most highly cited (according to Google Scholar, 618 to date) and became a “citation classic”* in 1984 at which time it had accumulated 164 citations. Simberloff & Wilson (1970) has attracted 252 cites with Wilson & Simberloff (1969) trailing in third with a mere 158 cites. As a point of interest, Simberloff (1976) has so far received 313 cites. To reiterate, the original mangrove island study, despite its flaws was a fantastic piece of work and Sinberloff and Wilson won the Mercer Award of the Ecological Society of America for this work in 1971.

I can think of no better person to explain why Simberloff & Wilson (1969) deserves its place in the Ecological Hall of Fame than Simberloff himself who in the commentary to the 1984 citation classic article wrote “I think the main reason it is cited, however, and its lasting contribution, is not so much that it supports the [equilibrium] theory, as that it reported a field experiment on ecological communities, and thus seemed dramatically different from the correlative approach that dominated this field”

“This is Simon Leather, he’s an ecologist, albeit an applied one” Thus was I introduced to a group of visiting ecologists by my then head of department at the Silwood Park campus of Imperial College. As you can imagine I was somewhat taken aback at this public display of the bias that ‘pure’ scientists have against those that they regard as ‘applied’. I was (and still am), used to this attitude, as even as an undergraduate doing Agricultural Zoology when we shared modules with the ‘pure’ zoologists, we were regarded as a slightly lower life form J Working in Finland as a post-doc in the early 1980s it was also obvious that there was a certain degree of friction between the pure and applied entomologists, so it was not a phenomenon confined entirely to the UK. To this day, convincing ecology undergraduates that integrated pest management is a suitable career for them is almost impossible.

I was an ecologically minded entomologist from early childhood, pinning and collecting did not interest me anywhere near as much as insect behaviour and ecology, but I knew that I wanted to do something “useful” when I grew up. Having seen my father in action as a plant pathologist and crop protection officer, it seemed to me that combining entomology with agriculture would be an ideal way to achieve this ambition. A degree in Agricultural Zoology at Leeds and a PhD in cereal aphid ecology at the University of East Anglia (Norwich) was the ideal foundation for my chosen career as an applied ecologist/entomologist.

I started my professional life as agricultural entomologist working both in the laboratory and in the field (cereal fields to be exact), which were easily accessible, generally flat, weed free and easy to manipulate and sample. In the UK even the largest fields tend to be visible from end to end and side to side when you stand in the middle or edge (even more so now than when I started as wheat varieties are now so much shorter, less than half the height they were in 1977).

Having fun as a PhD student – aphid ‘sampling’ in Norfolk 1978

I haven’t grown since I did my PhD so wheat must have shrunk 🙂

See the post script to see what wheat used to look like.

Laboratory experiments, even when working on mature plants were totally do-able in walk-in growth rooms, and at a push you could even fit whole earing wheat plants into a growth cabinet.

I then spent ten years working as a forest entomologist, where field sites were the exact opposite, and extreme measures were sometimes required to reach my study animals, including going on an official Forestry Commission tree climbing course.

Scaffold towers for really high work, but expensive (and scary on sloping hillsides).

And as for lab work, not a chance of using mature plants or even plants more than two to three years old. Excised branches and/or foliage (rightly or wrongly) were the norm*.

Doing field work was, despite the sometimes very physically challenging aspects, a lot of fun, and in my case, some very scenic locations. My two main field sites were The Spey Valley and

Sutherland and Caithness, both of which provided magnificent views and of course, a plethora of whisky distilleries

where I discovered what is now my favourite single malt 🙂

The real fun came when it was time to submit papers. Journal choice was (and is) very important. As Stephen Heard points out, journals have a ‘culture’ and it is very important to pick a journal that has the right editorial board and ethos. The laboratory work never seemed to be a huge problem, referees (perhaps wrongly) very rarely criticised the use of young plants or excised foliage. I was able to publish the output from what was a very applied project, in a range of journals from the very specialised to the more ecological. This selection for example, from 1985-1987 (Leather, 1985, 1986; Leather & Burnand, 1987; Leather et al., 1985), appeared in Ecological Entomology, Oecologia, Functional Ecology and Bulletin of Entomological Research respectively.

Papers reporting field-based work were a little bit harder to place in journals outside the mainstream forestry ones, particularly when it came to experimental work. One of the problems was that ecological referees unused to working in forests tended not to have a grasp of what was involved in setting up and servicing an experiment in a forest plantation or stand. A farmer has no great objection to an entomologist removing 100 wheat tillers a week from his 2 ha field (at 90 stems per metre2, even a 16 week field season would only remove a tiny fraction of his crop). A forest manager on the other hand with a stocking density of 3000 stems per hectare would look askance at a proposal to remove even 100 trees a month from a hectare plot, especially if this was repeated for seven years. Sample size was thus a problem, even when using partial sampling of trees, e.g. by removing say only one branch. When it came to field scale replication, to compare for example, three treatments and a control on two different soil types, where each treatment plot is a hectare, things get a bit difficult. The most that we could service, even with help (since we did not have huge financial resources), was three replicates of each treatment. In agricultural terms this seems incredibly low, where 10m2 plots or even smaller, are very often used (e.g. Staley et al., 2009; Garratt et al., 2011).

We thus ended up with our experimental papers in the really specialised forestry journals (e.g. Leather, 1993; Hicks et al., 2007). On the other hand, those papers based on observational, long-term data were easier to place in more general ecological journals (e.g. Watt et al., 1989), although that was not always enough to guarantee success (e.g. Walsh et al., 1993; Watt et al., 1991). Another bias that I came across (perhaps unconscious) was that referees appeared, and still do, think that work from production forests is not as valid as that coming from ‘natural’ forests, especially if they are tropical. We came across this when submitting a paper about the effects of prescribed burning on carabid populations in two sites in Portugal (Nunes et al., 2006). We originally sent this to a well-known ecological journal who rejected it on the grounds of low replication, although we had also replicated it temporarily as well as geographically. I was not impressed to see a paper published in this journal shortly after they had rejected our manuscript in which the authors had reported changes in insect communities after a one-off fire event in a tropical forest, without even the benefits of pre-fire baseline data. We had in the meantime, given up on general ecology journals and submitted our paper to a local forestry journal. Such is life.

I originally started this essay with the idea of bemoaning the fact that publishing studies based in production forests in more general journals was more difficult than publishing agriculturally based papers, but got diverted into writing about the way applied ecologists feel discriminated against by journals and pure ecologists. I may or may not have convinced you about that. To return to my original idea of it being more difficult for forestry–based ecologists to break out of the forestry journal ghetto than it is for agro-ecologists to reach a broader audience, I present the following data based on my own publication record, which very convincingly demonstrates that my original feeling is based on fact, albeit based on an n of one 🙂

Numbers of agricultural and forestry based papers published by me in different journal categories.

I might also add that being an entomologist also limits where you can publish, so being an applied entomologist is something of a double whammy, and when it comes to getting research council funding, don’t get me started!

Walsh, P.J., Day, K.R., Leather, S.R., & Smith, A.J. (1993) The influence of soil type and pine species on the carabid community of a plantation forest with a history of pine beauty moth infestation. Forestry, 66, 135-146.

Watt, A.D., Leather, S.R., & Stoakley, J.T. (1989) Site susceptibility, population development and dispersal of the pine beauty moth in a lodgepole pine forest in northern Scotland. Journal of Applied Ecology, 26, 147-157.

The height of mature wheat and other cereals has decreased hugely over the last two hundred years. Cereals were originally a multi-purpose crop, not just providing grain for humans, but bedding straw for stock and humans, winter fodder for animals, straw for thatching and if really desperate, you could make winter fuel out of discarded straw**.

John Linnell – Wheat 1860 You wouldn’t have been able to see Poldark’s (Aidan Turner) manly chest whilst he was scything in this field!

Pieter Breugel the Elder – Die Kornernter – The Harvesters (1565) – Head-high wheat crops and not just because the average height was lower in those days.

*As I was writing this article I came across this paper (Friberg & Wiklund, 2016) which suggests that using excised plants may be justifiable. Friberg, M. & Wiklund, C. (2016) Butterflies and plants: preference/performance studies in relation to plant size and the use of intact plants vs. cuttings. Entomologia experimentalis et applicata, 160, 201-208

**My source for this is Laura Ingalls Wilder – Little House on the Prairie, to be exact 🙂

In the space of a week I came across three items that made me despair even more than I normally do for the healthy future of our planet. Coincidentally I was reading Neal Stephenson’s novel Seveneves, which is also about the environmental destruction of the Earth as we know it, albeit by an external disaster and not by our own efforts. In his novel, the World’s leaders come together to save some of humanity and the planet’s genetic resources, and not destroy it as we seem hellbent on doing.

Item 1

Browsing in a local supermarket I came across what was to me, a new phenomenon, so-called Smartwater!

This is an example of how the fetish/obsession for bottled water has gone way over the top

Not a beautiful morning, rather a sign writ large upon the sky, of how much environmental harm we are doing to the planet.

Rather than expanding runways and airports to encourage growth in air-traffic and the use of fossil fuels, we should be thinking of ways to cut it and reduce our carbon footprint. Cat Stevens was thinking about this very issue in 1971 in his fantastic song “Where do the Children Play?”

“Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can’t get off.

Oh, I know we’ve come a long way,
We’re changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?”

On the plus side some nations seem to be taking a more responsible approach to the exploitation of finite resources. I am happy to say France, the location of our future retirement home, is leading the way in reducing the use of plastics. They are also way ahead of us in encouraging the use of solar energy by homeowners.

We are now officially in the Anthropocene Age which is probably not a good thing. It seems an appropriate moment to reflect on what we can do to halt, or at the very least, slow down, what seems to be an unstoppable race to extinction of most of the natural world. We all know what the principal causes are despite the obfuscation and prevarication that surrounds the debate. Equally, we are also aware of the mainly political and economic pressures that are preventing us from doing something to ease the pain and suffering we are inflicting on the world. I am not going to rehearse the arguments, but instead I will let the following speak to us all about why we need to keep and enhance what nature we have remaining.

“Though large herds of deer do much harm to the neighbourhood, yet the injury to the morals of the people is of more moment than the loss of their crops. The temptation is irresistible; for most men are sportsmen by constitution: and there is such an inherent spirit for hunting in human nature, as scarce any inhibitions can restrain” Gilbert White (1788)

“Really I did deserve a chastisement for my intrusion into the meadow, the disastrous consequences of which I now had power to perceive to the full extent. I had bruised the tender stalks of springing grass, broken quantities of buds, and destroyed myriads of living creatures. In my stupid simplicity I had never had any suspicion of the pain I caused while perpetrating these evil deeds, and had been in a state of delight at the profound peace pervading the country, and the charms of solitude” E van Bruyssel (1870)

“We can never afford to lose sight of past and present human activities in their effects on the vegetation of countries which have been long inhabited and densely populated, like those of Western and Central Europe” A G Tansley (1923)

“On the favourable side of the balance, I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My industry has been great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts. What is far more important, my love of natural science has been steady and ardent” Charles Darwin (1929*)

“We have tried to conquer nature by force and by intellect. It now remains for us to try the way of love It is impossible to use the full resources of the soil except with a mixture of plants (either grown together as in pasture or mixed crops grown in succession as a in a proper rotation of crops). In monoculture it is impossible to keep disease at bay for long, and in addition it is impossible to feed animals properly except on a varied mixture” Lord Northbourne (1940)

“The soil is among Nature’s greatest marvels. A clod of earth, seeming simple and lifeless, is now known to be highly complex in structure, its particles most elaborate in their composition, with numerous invisible crevices inhabited by prodigious numbers of living organisms inconceivably small, leading lives of which we can from only the haziest conception, yet somehow linked up with our lives in that they produce the food of plants which constitute our food, and remove from the soil, substances that would be harmful to us” Sir John Russell (1957)

“Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song” Rachel Carson (1962)

“I believe the strongest argument for keeping as much of the natural world as possible in the anthrosphere lies in the human need for variety, individuality, and the challenge of endeavouring to understand the nonhuman world. I believe, too, that emersion in the world of trees, flower, and wild creatures is needed to nourish human attributes now in short supply: awe, compassion, reflectiveness, the brotherhood we often talk about but rarely practice except on the most superficial of levels” Howard Ensign Evans (1966)

“I have heard it said more than once that the reason why there are more wire-worms afflicting the crops than in the past is that there are more tractors. The idea being that since the tractor-driven plough turns over three or four furrows at a time as against the horse-plough’s one furrow, the results is that birds get far fewer troughs in which to find worms, Thus more worms are left in the soil. It is an attractive theory, there is something cheering in the knowledge that Nature always hits back. Everything in nature has a meaning and a purpose. Everything is necessary to the universal scheme, every germ, every microbe, every pest. When anything ceases to serve the harmony it dies out” John Stewart Collis (1973)

“Humanity now co-opts something in the order of one-twentieth of all the photosynthesis – the primal driving process of life on the planet – for its own uses. And through its activities, Homo sapiens now threatens to alter the basic climatic patterns of the globe” Paul & Anne Ehrlich (1981)

“The rescue of biological diversity can only be achieved by a skillful blend of science, capital investment, and government: science to blaze the path by research and development; capital investment to create sustainable markets: and government to promote the marriage of economic growth and conservation” Edward Wilson (1992)

“Despite what developers will tell you about restoration, she said, once a piece of land is graded, the biologic organisms and understructure of the soil are destroyed. No one knows how to really re-create that, short of years of hand-weeding. Leaving land doesn’t work; the natives are overwhelmed by the invaders” Richard Louw (2005)

“Eventually some truth dawned: nature conservation is essentially concerned with mending the relationship between people and Nature, and is an expression of love for, and an interaction with, the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and with belonging in Nature” Matthew Oates (2015)

“Evidence shows that loss of interactions with nature changes people’ s attitudes toward nature, including the values they place on it, their beliefs concerning the environment, their perceived norms of environmental ethics, and their willingness to protect nature” Soga & Gaston (2016)

I could go on, and on, but I think you get the picture. We could have done so much so earlier.

Please share your favourite passages, be they gloomy or optimistic, by adding them to the comments.

Last year I wrote about my experience of being a tutor at the British Ecological Society’s Undergraduate Summer School at the Malham Tarn Field Studies Council site. I really enjoyed myself and also found it very refreshing to have the opportunity to interact with 50 bright young proto-ecologists. It appears that the students also enjoyed themselves as I was invited back this year to repeat my performance. I was very happy to accept the offer, after all, any chance to visit the county of my birth (Yorkshire) is not to be sneezed at and with the added bonus of being able to talk about entomology to a new audience thrown in I would have been made to turn it down. Thus it was that I headed up the dreaded M6 motorway on a sunny Monday afternoon (July 18th) with joy in my heart and a car boot full of entomological equipment and identification keys. The M6 did not disappoint and I spent an hour sweltering in the summer sunshine very slowly (very, very slowly) making my way through the inevitable road works. Luckily, being one of those people who likes to arrive early for appointments, I was only fifteen minutes late collecting my trusty assistant, Fran Sconce, from the very picturesque Settle Station and then heading up on to the FSC Malham Tarn site.

The weather on arrival was in marked contrast to last year.

We unloaded the car and just had time to set up 35 pitfall traps before heading in for the evening meal after which the students went on a long walk to Malham Cove.

The long walk

I walked part of the way back with them but turned back in time to get to the bar 🙂 for a very welcome drink, before retiring to bed.

The next day was even hotter, and we spent the morning setting up the labs and teaching areas.

This year, as well as the fifty undergraduates we had ten sixth form students from several different schools in London. Last year interacting with a class of fifty had posed certain difficulties, so this year we divided the students into two groups and ran the session twice, once on the Tuesday afternoon and then again on the Wednesday morning. This worked extremely well and meant that Fran and I and the PhD mentors assigned to us, were able to spend much more time with each student and also meant that we were not as rushed off our feet as we would have been otherwise. So a win/win outcome, although I did have to give the same lecture twice in 24 hours which was an interesting experience. On the Tuesday afternoon, I started with my lecture on why entomology is important and an overview of the insects.

I seem to have done a lot of arm waving

We then went outside and I demonstrated sampling methods while the students baked under, a by now, extremely hot sun, before sending them off to empty and reset the pitfall traps and collect other insects using nets and beating trays.

Being cruel to trees

Some of the stars of the day

Then it was back to the labs to identify the catches before the evening meal and refreshing drink or two in the bar*. After the bar closed we had the fluorescent beetle extravaganza. Last year I demonstrated the use of fluorescent dust on one hapless carabid beetle. This year I used ten, and two different coloured dusts. The beetles were then released after dark in

Fluorescing carabids

the courtyard outside the teaching labs where they were photographed fluorescing colourfully under my UV flashlight, as I ‘chased’ them around the arena, much to the delight of the watching students.

As the weather forecast was not very good for the Wednesday morning, we did the insect sampling first, in case the forecast rain was as heavy as predicted. As it turned out, apart from a short sharp shower, whilst I was demonstrating sampling methods, the sun came out and there were plenty of insects to collect before I did my lecture and we headed in to the labs for another ID session. All too soon the session was over, and Fran and I, after a hasty lunch, drove back down to Shropshire.

I think that the BES summer school is a superb idea and that the students get a great deal from it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope that I get the chance to be involved in any future summer schools. I was also greatly impressed by the 6th formers who certainly seemed to enjoy my entomology session, one of whom produced this excellent drawing.

Much better than anything I could draw

For those of you on Twitter #bestug16 will give you a flavour of the whole week.

Welcome to the lounge, where entomologists and insect enthusiasts can relax, grab a cup and put on a nice music. Step out of your day job, and step into your zone, where you reconnect with your passion for insects and enrich yourself with more knowledge.